Janet Daley

Of course the theme was unity. That was absolutely right and completely predictable. Joe Biden called for an end to the divisive hatred and the intolerant anger that had ended with the storming of the Capitol where he now stood, and which threatened to bring America as a model of democracy to the world into disrepute.

He pleaded for healing and reconciliation, and, above all, for a recognition that democracy can only prevail when disagreement is civil: dissent is not only acceptable, it is essential to democratic politics but it must not degenerate into outright animosity, let alone violence. He was talking here, not just about the mob that had wreaked such havoc, but about the partisan vindictiveness of Washington party politics which has seemed incurable. (“Every disagreement doesn’t have to be total war.”)

The tone could not have been more different from that of his predecessor whom he did not mention by name. But there are questions that will only be answered over the coming months and years about the real meaning of this message for his presidency and for his party. What kind of reconciliation is this to be? What sort of unity is he proposing?

Being the patently decent man that he is, Biden was clearly sincere in his longing for tolerance to return to the public discourse (to “stop the shouting and lower the temperature”). Otherwise, there would be no nation at all, he said, only a state of chaos. (“Let’s listen to one another; hear one another.”) And he celebrated the fact that in that very spot the “riotous mob” which had tried to overturn the democratic will and the Constitution had not succeeded. (“...It did not happen. It will not happen – not ever.”)

All of this was fine and true, if largely unsurprising. But there were also some nicely pointed references to the era that had just passed: “There is truth and there are lies – lies told for power and for profit.” Democracy cannot survive in a miasma of self-serving deception: that was the harder, less sentimental, message.

What we need to know is how much of this might be a repudiation, not just of Trumpism’s “racism” and “nativism” but of that other divisive force which has been embraced by his own party: identity politics.

Are his Cabinet appointments, so clearly fixed on gender and racial balance, a clearer indication that his priorities are not those of the new poor in the rust belt?

Trump had won his fanatical following by making himself the champion of the post-industrial wastelands of America: the old bluecollar class whose jobs and industries had gone abroad and whose lives and hopes were devastated. They were the people who believed themselves to have been abandoned by mainstream politics and by the Democratic Party which was once their champion.

Biden himself is from Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is a prime example of just such a region. He made only one reference to this problem. He understood the “trepidation” of many Americans about jobs and their own futures. “I get it,” he said, “but the answer isn’t to turn inward.”

But does he really understand that “trepidation” scarcely covers it: that this is rage and a deep sense of betrayal for which his own administration will have to find an answer if there is ever to be an end to what he called “this uncivil war”? We are about to find out.